Does emacs distro matter?

I am trying to get into emacs but there are different kinds of emacs. Can you recommend one that works in TTY environment? I know this is lazy but I want one that works out of the box for "text editing, programming", also really interested in EWW and the email apps. Are there any existing distro that are closest to the functionality I want? I want to tinker as least as possible. But willing to nonetheless. Just don't want to do It if there are existing configuration already. Not sure if distro is the correct term, if not please correct me! Thank you in advance!

> Can you recommend one that works in TTY environment? Yes: GNU Emacs.

So `eww` is built in on recent versions, plus most of what else you need. "Distro" is a misnomer. More like "Pre-configured" and there's a couple well-maintained ones, Doom Emacs and Soacemacs. Both are "Evil" configs ... Meaning they use default Vim keybindings. Personally, I'm vanilla and roll my own, with default Emacs keybindings.

The "big" distros tend to be about bundling up lots of functionality in a curated experience, and often change many aspects of Emacs behaviour. It's hard to say if you'll like that or not. It depends what your expectations are. If you're expecting a full IDE experience a distro gets you that fast, if you just want a powerful text editor with unlimited expansion opportunities Vanilla Emacs is, IMHO still a better starting point. The specific functionality you're asking about is all available in the upstream "Vanilla" GNU Emacs - it'll work on the TTY or as a GUI as you wish, and if you only need it in the TTY you can choose to install a "no-x" version in many Linux distros. One thing that doesn't work so well in a TTY are colour themes, but in most cases you'll want Emacs to just use your TTY colours, and vanilla emacs will do that fine. Just using vanilla Emacs is the lightest way to start out (in terms of resource usage), and most of the things you'll need to learn to customise it, you'd end up having to learn anyway if you want to customize it (and actually distros add their own distro specific stuff to customisation, which makes some things easier, but some things harder). If you go vanilla, you won't get VIM keybindings, and a bunch of IDE features out of the box, but you will still have the ability to add these latter is you wish.

I see, Thank you!

For TTY I suggest vanilla Emacs. Or even `emacs-nox` (no GUI support). That's what I install by default on remote hosts. It's good to learn vanilla because you never NEED anything more. Everything else is gravy

I see! thank you!

This is a good place to start reading about all these things: https://masteringemacs.org/reading-guide

I started out using emacs "distros" and while it was an ok introduction, I actually wish I had just started with vanilla straight away. If you follow along with the emacs from scratch series ( [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=74zOY-vgkyw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=74zOY-vgkyw) ) you will end up with most of the functionality you want, it won't take that long in the grand scheme of things, and you will come away actually understanding what the heck is going on under the hood to some extent. Elisp looks really odd at the start, but once you get used to it, it's actually a pretty nice little langauge for mundane day to day scripting tasks. I actually use it as my go to calculator now since it is always right there in emacs buffers.

For clarification if you run emacs with `emacs -nw` it will open in the terminal.

haha, Thats actually the series that got me thinking maybe going straight to vanilla isn't a good idea after all (12x\~1hour videos). But hearing your experience gave me the confidence I'm on the right path. Thank you!

Opensuse provides emacs-gtk and emacs -nox (No X)

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You do not *have* to use vim bindings with [Spacemacs](https://www.spacemacs.org/). You have a choice of editing style: emacs, vim, or hybrid (a mix of Emacs and Vim), and even switch between Emacs and Vim mid-session. See [Spacemacs editing styles](https://www.spacemacs.org/doc/DOCUMENTATION.html#editing-styles) for more details.

There's a bunch of different starter kits linked [here](https://github.com/emacs-tw/awesome-emacs#starter-kit). Some of them are old and out-of-date, so check them carefully.

Fortunately the way Emacs works basically anything written for it will work no matter how Emacs itself runs so it all "just works" in the terminal and in GUI. I've happily used Doom Emacs for a while, it's fast and stable, and very easy to configure, you can literally do it in 3 minutes by just going through one file and uncommenting the names of languages you plan to use, there's also a mediocre docs for it and a very big community. They include options for e-mail integration and eww i think too, or maybe it was w3m. I'd recommend this one the most, even if it can take a bit of a while to download, compared to Spacemacs. The cool thing is that in their docs every "module" has a list of emacs packages that it actually uses, so you can just go ahead and transfer what you use to vanilla afterwards, as I've done. Spacemacs is the biggest as far as my impressions go for, the most "full distribution of a program" of the bunch, but i had problems with crashes and instabilities on it sadly and the setup is... slightly more painful than Doom, and they have their own ways of doing everything. Left them soon. I've heard good things about prelude, it's nice, couldn't try it for long enough, went to vanilla too fast after that. And yeah, I also use distro, even if it's kinda innacurate, people get what you mean.

my emacs.d, https://github.com/redguardtoo/emacs.d I use Emacs in TTY most time. Gnus is the email client, I also wrote a Gnus guide. eww is not in my emacs.d, but it's easy to set up anyway. According to the github stars (2.1k), could I claim it's 5h popular distro at github? Only less popular than spacemacs, doom, pucell's emacs.d, prelude. don't know why it's missing in awesome emacs' Starter Kit list.

Emacs is a tool for the rest of your life.

Came here to say this.

The whole point of Emacs is to tailor it to yourself though. Instead of molding your process to the off the shelf tools that are available, you mold your tool (Emacs) to suit your desired/imagined process. And/or the way your own brain works. Which is different for each of us. Yes this takes an investment of time and energy. But I will submit to you that the payoff is worth it.